This week, we visited the Salon du Chocolat, a huge chocolate expo at the Porte de Versailles. It was a chocolate, and people, overload — perhaps we should have expected it, since there are very few foods that people are more passionate about than chocolate.

This snack is like butter and jam on toast, but tweaked into something a little more sophisticated.

The camembert has a buttery, creamy texture, but, you know, cheesier. It’s got a little funk on it. But it’s not a punch-you-in-the-face funk, just a mellow funk.

The grapes here are cooked just a little — not to the point where they’ve turned into jam, but just enough to warm them up and concentrate their sugars. You can use any grapes you like, as long as they’re seedless, but I happen to love the colors on the gorgeous flame grapes. The thyme lends a savory note that keeps this snack from heading into dessert territory.

I snacked on this on a rainy afternoon before a long night of chugging through some work emails, but these lovely little crostini would be equally at home as the appetizer at a fall party.

The very first thing I made upon arriving in France was a quiche. A full-sized, caramelized onion and gruyere quiche that I took to my first brunch. The onions were a little over-sweet and it was overcooked due to a timer error, but it worked out in the end. Quiches are forgiving that way.

Since then, I have bizarrely ignored what is clearly the best brunch food known to man. Which is silly, really, given mytartobsession (meaning that I always have several rounds of pastry crust in the freezer) and the gentleman requiring eggs in the morning the way a Frenchman requires a strike at least once a year.

Here’s the thing about quiche, or at least, the thing I like best about quiche: because you have this butter crust holding it together, the eggs can be soft. Extremely soft. Softer than perfect soft-scrambled eggs. If you’re a soft-eggs person, quiche is the ultimate in satisfaction and gooey yolky nirvana.

I remember when September meant that I had finally grown bored with summer vacation and was actually excited to start school again. (Not that that feeling lasted very long.) Now it just means that the strawberries won’t be worth eating for at least eight months and I should really start thinking about getting a new wool coat.

My favorite after-school snack when I was a kid was a Coke Slurpee from 7-11 and a grilled cheese sandwich. American cheese on white bread with lots of margarine, fried almost black. I loved it.

Cheese, especially good cheese, is expensive. If you want dairy made from happy grass-eating cows and sheep and goats, you’re going to need to spend a little more than you would on dairy from animals fed on industrial corn. But I swear you can taste the sunshine and green fields and happiness in that cheese, and to me, that’s worth it.

I don’t know much about wine. I can tell the difference between a bad wine and a good wine, but I’m not sure I could tell between a good wine and a great wine — or it could be that I have yet to taste a truly great wine. I know that I tend to like aromatic whites like Gewürztraminer and Grüner Veltliner, and I tend to dislike reds with extremely high or low levels of tannins. But if you were to give me a Pinot noir, I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether it was from Bourgogne or the Jura or Alsace.

That’s why I love places like Ô Chateau. It’s a place where the curious can explore and ask questions and taste very good wine from all over France in a comfortable environment with — and this is the best part — educated, eloquent sommeliers to explain the differences and make sure you know what you’re drinking.

Sometimes, you are invited to two or three apéro/cocktail/dinner parties in one weekend. And clearly, you don’t want to show up empty-handed. And it just so happens that it’s the enchanting time of year when lush, shining berries and figs, leaking juice, are all over the markets. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, make these. Take them to parties on a pretty tray.